Recently in the Art Category

The other day at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, I attended a brown bag talk given by my Seton Hill colleague, Maureen Vissat, The Art of the 1940s: Styles and Influences. I had seen her present as part of a series of teaching demonstrations, so I knew her talk would be excellent. She wove interesting details from the lives of notable painters and gallerists to form an informative picture of how art and artists are made, and the dual role of the gallery as archive of what is already established and promoter of the new and innovative. Her slide show included several shots of the gallery spaces, not just close-ups of the paintings or portraits of the artists themselves.

Her talk was timed to coincide with an exhibit of American painters of the 1940s. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be a permalink for this gallery, but for the moment, and presumably unitl the exhibit closes in October, there's a description on the current exhibitions page.

[T]his exhibition reconstructs a sampling of the exhibitions of the same title organized by Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh (now Carnegie Museum of Art) from 1943 to 1949 and includes 48 paintings, of which 42 are the actual works that were selected for exhibitions over the seven-year period. These annual exhibitions of American painting replaced the Institute's annual Carnegie International while it was suspended due to World War II.

I've included thumbnails of some of my favorite paintings below.

My six-year-old daughter is a very visual thinker, who absolutely adores her brother. About a year ago, I stumbled across a notebook of sketches I made in 1980, when I was 12, and I remember how much I enjoyed drawing gadgets and cityscapes.

So I bought a notebook and some mechanical pencils, thinking I'd encourage my daughter to express herself through art, and maybe in the process reawaken the visual part of my brain.

So, in my spare moments around the house, I started sketching web page layouts, or characters and props from the bedtime stories I've been telling my daughter. (Recently, I had a burning need to know what an engine room looked like in our ether-powered blimpship.)

Carolyn has picked up the habit from me -- we supply her with little notebooks which she happily fills up.  She drew this picture during church this weekend. There's Carolyn on the left (note the "C" floating above her head) snuggled up against her brother Peter.  Note also the little hearts inside the letters.

At the time she drew the above picture, I was sitting between Carolyn and Peter, and I wouldn't let her squirm across me to show this picture to her brother.  Blinking back tears, Carolyn sat down in the pew and drew another, very different picture:

That's Carolyn on the left again, with a heart hovering over head as before -- only now the heart is broken, and each broken half contains the letter "P". One finger points to herself, the other points pleadingly towards her brother (whose shoulders droop in sorrow, and whose own floating broken heart contains little "C"s).

I have been reduced to a vertical barrier -- an impersonal force separating the two siblings.

Dene joined us remotely from her lab in Vancouver, demonstrating multimedia works that are performed through hyperlinks triggered by a performer's actions in a 3D space.  The demonstration is intended to challenge the notions of a hyperlink as a silent component of a 2D work.

First demonstration -- Virtual DJ.  

Spinning circles of light seem to track the performer as she moves a motion-tracking controller in 3D space.  Four cameras track down on a 9x9x9 space; we saw 8 maps of "Level 1," the music and lights are located in different directions, so one has to remember where each zone is.  She carries a small container that emits an infrared light, picked up by the cameras.  Space divided into a 3D grid, with different media objects programmed into the grid.  A PC reads the performer's location in space, talks to a Mac which runs sound and visual elements. Software: "Reason"


Things of Day and Dream, corporeal poetry.

Software: "Ableton" (it sounded like that... unfamiliar to me)  Recorded a poem, divided it up into chunks... video clips keyed with the text in 13 zones.  Each chunk of spoken word invokes a different chunk of video, with music playing throughout.  Text, video, and music all embedded in 13 different zones.  Very short -- just a minute and 5 seconds.  Grid divided into 2 regions, 10 different phrases on the "dream" side, and 2 with "awake," and in the middle is a liminal zone.  [Question... what does live interaction add to the performance? Watching someone else -- a specialist -- interact with a 3D space is one kind of experience...]


Rhapsody Room. 

Spaces trigger individual words, also keying changes in the sound track and lighting. "Jolt," "sky," "final".   Pronouns high, in the middle were the modifiers, and on the ground were the verbs.  Intersting experience.

[The complexity of navigating through the 3D menus reminds me of the frustrating experience of navigating multiple 90 degree turns through nested Windows menus.  It takes a precision that seems mechanical and robotic... how often does the system poll the location of the controller? How does that affect the nature of the experience?]

The whole studio setup reminds me -- just slightly -- of the "mood room" in Anthony Clarvoe's PICK UP AX.  Lab set up with a collaborator in Canada... very little lag time.  There's too much lag to create classical music.

Question from Mark Marino: how do new users interact with the system?

Dene says it takes people about 20 seconds of moving the controller up and down, but within 30 seconds people start moving around.  People who are comfortable with their bodies and uninhibited are all over the place, but people who are more reserved are more timid with the controller.   Designed to be portable and friendly to new users.

Rather than a mouse running across a desk, the mouse is a tracker, the surface is air, and a hyperlink is an invisible point in 3D space.  [I guess her controller doesn't have a clicker, so it's all activated by "hover".]

Invoked Jeff Parker's "A Poetics of the Link." 

Patterns, repetition, cycles... a physical instantiation of the interaction of cameras, trackers, light, computers, along with the human performer's body, brought to fruition by the hyperlinks.  Disorienting, but not silent gaps.  We tend to think of hypertext disjoined spaces, but Dene sees them as potentially contiguous.

Dene -- "event link" -- multidimensional event space. Invoked Aarseth's notion of time in ergotic works. Time in the tale, time of the telling, and the event time.  DIalectic between aporia (gaps) and epiphany (insight).  Dene sees her work as lacking gaps.

3D perforamce works are about signification and mapping... performer finds her own sense of order. Transition, relay, and movement. Emphasizes the performer inside the system. Human, corporeal contribution to the work of art.  Add, along to the perception of reading along multiple paths, also the mutiple paths of performance, multiple ways of the human performer interacting with the work.

"Corporeal Poetics."

The controller has no "click" function, so all the 3D ineractions is "hover."

Diana Slattery, "Glide" - build a visual language and gesturing, hand gestures.

Kate Pullinger and mouse-over.  "Breathing Wall" -- breathing into an apparatus to move the story along with the breath.

Mark B. asked how this counts as literature -- is it scored?  Virtual DJ isn't written down, Rhapsody Room is open enough that anyone can innovate, but Day and Dream takes practice to perform.

The notion of ephemeral beauty is part of the allure of this kind of work... "Do I really care" whether it's possible to capture it?

The space can handle four different trackers, each triggering different actions in the various spaces.

The demos we saw were all based on the tracker's location in 3D space.

In The Mindful Play Environment, it is possible to use trajectory, speed, proximity of trackers to each other...  Dene's website has a video of that work in progress for the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry.

GamePlasma.com broke a story about a new adventure game, Limbo of the Lost, which uses digital assets from the RPG Oblivion. (There are plenty of screenshots in the article.)

Eric was recently assigned a game developed by Majestic Studios titled "Limbo of the Lost." At first glance, this game appears to be your typical point and click adventure again. This time, however, something seemed oddly familiar to him. Eric, being the avid PC gamer that he is, noticed that there were some similiarties between Limbo of the Lost and The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion.

The first example of this can be seen in the screenshots from Oblivion and Limbo of the Lost below. Notice how everything is placed in exactly the same place and almost all of the textures are identical. In fact, the only real difference is the quality of the texture and overall graphical look. Even the portrait that can be seen under the stairs is exactly the same as the one that can be found in Oblivion. Also, take note of the placement of the rug in the middle of the floor and the placement of the stairways. These similarities lead to many questions. How rampant are situations like this in games that fall under the radar of the typical gaming crowd?

Now, it's possible that Limbo of the Lost purchased the rights to re-use the art and 3D models, but Oblivion isn't the only game the creators of Limbo of the Lost have borrowed from.

Jason Lutes:

With every step "forward" in any area of human endeavor, something is gained, and with rare exception there is a concomitant loss. I feel this keenly in video game design, as the cutting edge of graphics slices into the future, opening up new and ever hotter arteries of experience for the player, but leaving imagination dead in its wake. Consider an informal visual chronology of computer game graphics:

Left to right, top to bottom: Colossal Cave Adventure (1976), Rogue (1980), Lords of Midnight (1984), Master of Magic (1993), Age of Wonders 2 (2002), Battle for Middle-Earth (2004).

The earliest text adventures used words alone to suggest the game world, allowing the player's imagination to fill in all of the details. Later, the ideogrammatic use of ASCII characters made possible things like the dungeon floorplans of Rogue to be clearly delineated, but that "*" that represented a pile of gold was still something to conjure with. With each step in the progression from limited-palette, low-resolution graphics to high-res 3D models and particle effects -- with each step toward a more photorealistic rendering of the game environment -- the player has to do that much less creative work, that much less imaginative interaction.

I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad progression. The trade-off is that we get games that are more immediately, actively immersive, as opposed to ones in which we have to work to immerse ourselves. Something is lost, but something else is certainly gained. Even as better and better graphics technology is erasing the need for an active imagination in playing video games, increasingly sophisticated game design has made possible a range of consequential (as opposed to imaginative) interactivity that is unparalleled in any other medium. Plus, I'd hazard that most people who play video games don't want to use their imaginations -- they just want a fun ride¹. The more bells and whistles the better.

Each of us probably have our own sweet spot between abstraction and representation, a point where our imagination is fired up by the power of suggestion, but would be extinguished by too much more information.

The idea isn't new, but the phrasing is clear and effective.  Todd Alcott:

Just as movies began as novelties shown before "real" entertainment, or as nickel entertainments in amusement arcades, well, that describes the early days of gaming as well. Movies went from Train Arriving at a Station to The Great Train Robbery in twelve years and from the 15-minute Great Train Robbery to the maximum-opus Birth of a Nation in seven. Gaming started with Pong and Pac-Man in the 70s and got to Doom in the 90s, then Half-Life a mere four years later. If Half-Life is the Birth of a Nation, that means that the Gone With the Wind of gaming is still in our future, and the Godfather of gaming as well.

Nerdvana: ROFLCon (From Leeeeroy Jeninks to Bert is Evil to LOLTrek to  Tron guy, old friends come back from the abyss; good thing too, because I've got more than 15 minutes of love for our favorite memes of yesteryear.)

Mix up a bunch of super famous internet memes, some brainy academics, a big audience, dump them in Cambridge, MA and you've got ROFLCon.

The conference is slated for April 25th and 26th of 2008.

It's a group dissection of internet culture. What makes it work, why it works, how it works. We'll talk about where internet culture has been and where we think it's going.

Then, there'll be parties. A music show, with memes performing their work live. And then a big blowout party at the end, with everyone dancing and rocking out.

Needless to say, this might be the most important gathering since the fall of the tower of Babel.

Back when the box art had little to do with the way computer games looked, you got used to the cognitive disconnect between the two media.

My brain still hasn't fully processed Infocom Diskgate, when I come across a trove of Atari 2600 cartridges that resemble games I played, but the boxes seem... different.  Here's my favorite.

Check out the others at Mightygodking.

Carolyn, my five-year-old, wept in the middle of "Owly 2: Just a Little Blue."  The Owly books use no words, just icons and facial expressions to tell some very complex stories. Carolyn likes stories about adventure and friendship, and she's a visual learner. Once I helped her interpret the first few speech bubble icons, she was able to "read" the story to me quite easily. Bedtime is always a struggle for her, and I don't think she was really prepared for the emotional intensity of the story. The story ends on a happy note, but the next day she was still distressed enough that she had to tell mommy about the sad parts.

There's no death or betrayal, just a misunderstanding, but the long wordless sequence where Owly seems to give up his hopes communicates disappointment and sadness so clearly that I think my daughter was caught off-guard.  The book is absolutely delightful, but you should know your child -- the artwork really drives the emotion home. 

When I was little, I loved a book about a little red lighthouse that was dwarfed by the construction of a new bridge. I was just thinking about that book recently, and made a mental note to ask my mother what the title was so I could get a copy and read it to my five-year-old. Today I was browsing on the book-sale table at the Latrobe library, when the very book I was looking for jumped out at me:



A few minutes with Google revealed something I never knew... apparently there really was such a little lighthouse that was scheduled for demolition, but when this book was published in the 40s, it proved so popular that the authorities decided to preserve the little lighthouse instead. (Photo by The Insider.)

There's even a Little Red Lighthouse Festival!

Lisa Zyga, Physorg.com:

The basis of the 2x4-inch "Digital Tattoo Interface" is a Bluetooth device made of thin, flexible silicon and silicone. It´s inserted through a small incision as a tightly rolled tube, and then it unfurls beneath the skin to align between skin and muscle. Through the same incision, two small tubes on the device are attached to an artery and a vein to allow the blood to flow to a coin-sized blood fuel cell that converts glucose and oxygen to electricity. After blood flows in from the artery to the fuel cell, it flows out again through the vein.

On both the top and bottom surfaces of the display is a matching matrix of field-producing pixels. The top surface also enables touch-screen control through the skin.

Thanks for a very creepy link, Josh.

I took a little break from evaluating a close reading assignment in order to look into the online chatter about George W. Bush's interpretation of a painting called "A Charge to Keep."  Bush hung it on his wall because he identifies with the guy out in front, whom he sees as leading a tough climb over rough terrain.

One hundred different people hitting a drum, from age 1 to 100. A short film by Lenka Clayton and James Price.

The new clip improves on last night's version, I've added blinking eyes, improved the nose glowing effect, and moved one of the legs a bit.

I've been using Blender3D for about two years now. Here's a little Christmas animation I whipped up.

That's supposed to be sparkly glowy things coming from his shiny nose, but it looks more like a puff of breath. I'm pleased with the head motions. I've got the eyes rigged up so they can blink and track an object, and I've got the two front legs rigged. I'll probably try to rig the other legs and do a simple walking animation, but I'm through for the day.

Adam Parrish:

The Frotzophone is an interface for making music with interactive fiction. The topography simulated in the game is used to generate sound, as is the player's path through the game. A Frotzophone "performance" looks just like playing a text adventure; but in addition to playing a game, you're also playing music. Here's a sample of the Frotzophone's audio output. This sample was generated from playing the first part of Zork I--up until I got killed by the troll. Download the full track here (2'12", 192kbps MP3).

Guardian (UK):

Police forces should issue comical caricatures of the criminals they are hunting instead of standard photofits, according to a team of scientists who found that cartoon-like faces are better at jolting people's memories.

Someone bought a collection of old slides from a second-hand shop, scanned them and posted them online, then got in touch with the photographer -- who had tossed them into a trash bin 30 years ago.

I was an artist in Vietnam and served with the Department of Information, Mac Headquarters. During my time there I shot hundreds, if not thousands, of 35 mm slides and photos. Years ago we moved from Siloam Springs Akansas to Hawaii. I had boxes and boxes of slides, photos etc. I had all this stuff in storage for years and upon moving decided it was time to move on and get rid of it. I tossed all the slides and numbers of photos in a dumpster by the alley of our old business - Grantree & HIll Gallery and Framing in Siloam Springs. You are the second person to contact me that purchased slides at an antique shop in Arkansas. She was a professional photographer and appreciated my work also. It seems someone had to climb into the dumpster, sort them out and then sell them to a shop where you and others purchased. What a story. I appreciate your interest and my time in Vietnam was needless to say a life experience.

This quote from a Gizmodo interview caught my attention.

There is considerable attention given to John Wilkes Booth as the central figure in the majority of the artworks. For instance, I have been rewriting the code (story line) for the interactive fiction game 'Adventure!' to include Booth as the lead antagonist.

Bill "Calvin and Hobbes" Watterson reviews the new Charles "Peanuts" Schultz biography in the Wall Street Journal.

Lucy, for all her domineering and insensitivity, is ultimately a tragic, vulnerable figure in her pursuit of Schroeder. Schroeder's commitment to Beethoven makes her love irrelevant to his life. Schroeder is oblivious not only to her attentions but also to the fact that his musical genius is performed on a child's toy (not unlike a serious artist drawing a comic strip). Schroeder's fanaticism is ludicrous, and Lucy's love is wasted. Schulz illustrates the conflict in his life, not in a self-justifying or vengeful manner but with a larger human understanding that implicates himself in the sad comedy. I think that's a wonderfully sane way to process a hurtful world. Of course, his readers connected to precisely this emotional depth in the strip, without ever knowing the intimate sources of certain themes. Whatever his failings as a person, Schulz's cartoons had real heart.

--Echochrome - the Escher Game (YouTube, Via Game Girl Advance)

What a hypnotically simple interface! This is a PSP game. Since I'm not a platform gamer, I'll have to admire this one from afar.

News emerged over the weekend that Church authorities have complained to Sony about the depiction of Manchester Cathedral in the game. Some reports have stated that the Church may pursue legal action against the company.

But according to Alex Chapman of Campbell Hooper solicitors,"The Church will have an uphill battle in a legal claim against Sony, and indeed it is likely that there is no basis for a claim." --Church will face ''uphill battle'' if suing Sony, says legal expert (Games Industry Biz)

I've been following this story about Resistance: The Fall of Man.

I'm reminded of when sculptor Frederick Hart was surprised to discover that that a copy of a sculpture he had created for the National Cathedral in Washington D.C. was featured for about 20 minutes in the movie Devil's Advocate, and that the filmmakers had actually animated the sculpture to turn it into what the Anglican church leaders called a distortion of a religious sculpture.

Sony was forced to re-edit the film before they could release it on DVD and video (after agreeing to put disclaimer stickers on the copies of the movie that had already been produced).

The National Cathedral case involved a living artist, who still owned the copyright to a work that was commissioned for a religious purpose. The Manchester Cathedral case probably doesn't involve much recently-produced art, and the leaders object to the fact that the digital re-creation of the church is the setting for a gunfight.

It will be interesting to see how the mainstream media represent the Manchester case, since it involves a video game. (We've already seen that even the very edgy indie Slamdance Film Festival is not a safe place for envelope-pushing videogames.)

I am an animator and concept artist by trade. However, I don't think my art is really so great that it deserves a "how to". My devotion to my live steam hobby however, lends my steampunk designs a level of authenticity that often lacks in steampunk art. Therefore, this is just a quick explanation of parts, and how to draw and design a machine that "looks" convincing.

Please keep in mind that these are super simple explanations of different components of live steam, and steam buffs will probably will tear these descriptions to pieces :) I feel that it is important to get the basic idea without having to go into dry and boring detail. By no means am I an expert in steam engines. This info is taken from my personal experience working on small scale live-steam engines. Most of the examples below are found on model engines, which works off of the same basic principle as the big ones. This is also just a guide. There are no set rules for concept art. You just make whatever appeals to you. In other words.... this is steam for artists, not really to educate you in details of steam power! :) However, it is important to understand some fundamentals of steam power, in order to make your drawings look believable, as something that could have been built in Victorian times.

First you have to understand steam, and how it works by looking at each part of the machine. --How to Draw SteamPunk Machines (www.crabfu.com)

I love the site -- it's got some really cool artwork and photos of steam engines (toy-sized, but real).

Some day when I have time, I want to re-design my whole website with a steam punk theme.

According to Marmor, Monet's work began to show a yellowish cast as his cataracts developed. To reveal how Monet saw the world, Marmor darkened images using Photoshop and reduced the levels of blue to replicate a yellowing effect. He also used blurring filters.

The results suggest that Monet's vision corrupted his ability to see colors correctly. This -- and not a desire to reflect the growing expressionist style of painting -- may explain the abstract nature of Monet's later work. --Randy Dotinga --Photoshop Re-Creates Aging Impressionists' Eye on the World (Wired)

Here point your thunder, and exhaust your rage!
Yet shun their fault, who, scandalously nice,
Will needs mistake an author into vice;
All seems infected that th' infected spy,
As all looks yellow to the jaundic'd eye. -- Alexander Pope, "An Essay on Criticism"

If you checked out the Newsweek article that I mentioned last time, you were subjected to the above image, with multiple Oscar-winning actor Tom Hanks all dolled up in hi-tech mo-cap gear. Here is where Warner Bros' marketing was really banking on the prestige of Hanks getting all dirty, showing that he's willing to go the extra mile to give us, the audience, something worth watching. But, unfortunately, we are given the actual image from the movie from where this performance was captured. A "before and after" scenario, I guess. It's all too telling, if you ask me. Do you see what's happened from Point A to Point B? Somehow they spent millions of dollars to literally take the soul out of an Oscar-winning actor's performance. That's quite a feat!

I sat there just staring at this image, trying to figure out what happened. What exactly is going on here? Why does the image on the top look so engaging, so vibrant, so full of life, but the image on the bottom - which is supposed to be the exact same performance of the actor "captured" by the computer - look so dead and puppet-like? --Ward Jenkins --The Polar Express: A Virtual Train Wreck (conclusion) (Ward O Matic)

An animator re-touches images from The Polar Express, to show how to bring life back into the 3D characters who looked like automatons in the finished film.

Whatever one thinks of the game's content, the game went through an extensive judging process and was deemed a finalist by a jury of game experts. To have the game pulled based on either pressure from backers or a fear of liability is to say that independent games do not deserve the same respect and conscientious protection by artistic venues as independent films. Would a difficult, perhaps controversial, film be pulled from the festival under the same circumstances? Of course not -- and it had never happened in the history of the festival. That is the point of having a festival such as Slamdance, to confront those moments when media and sensibility and culture are in conflict. To offer a place where the independent independents can be seen, appreciated, lauded or condemned -- but not hidden or refused.

[...]

[A] festival honoring a "philosophy of design" must be open to more than just beautiful independent games or independent games that make us feel good; and, that those striving to support independent game making must be ready to defend games that are difficult and provocative in terms of their content, as well as games that are challenging and innovative in their game play. We support such games and it is in that spirit that we withdraw our sponsorship. --USC Interactive Media Division Withdraws Slamdance Sponsorship (Ludicidal Tendencies)

The fallout over Slamdance's decision to pull Super Columbine Massacre RPG! continues.

With the aid of a photo, master illustrator Rob Sacchetto will hand-illustrate a custom portrait depicting you as a brain-chasing ghoul. --Zombie Portraits

-- Reinhold Grether --Virtual Performance Bibliography (netzwissenschaft)

Designed for courses "Theater and the Internet" & "The Digital Arena."

The Bob Ross game will utilize the unique inputs that the Nintendo DS and Nintendo Revolution have that can truly immerse the players while they learn to paint like Bob Ross and can play the addictive and fun games that we have planned for the title. I believe that Bob Ross Inc's and AGFRAG Entertainment Group's similar beliefs in independence, creativity, and teaching others will benefit how the game is developed and how the players of all ages will be able to enjoy this game.

I want the community to share with us their favorite Bob Ross shows, painting techniques, and what they?d like to see in the NDS and Revolution games. We want to keep the brush going."
--Bob Ross Video Game (bobross.com)

Bob Ross... the happy little clouds... the gravity-defying 'do... the "addictive and fun" game!

This quote from the Bob Ross rotten.com biography made me burst out laughing: "While some folks distract themselves toting iPods of sh*tty music around like colostomy bags, others prefer to remain focused on a cardboard canvas with a modest fan brush."

The International Society of Cubists officially launched its Web site today, a brilliant rejection of natural form and perspective that metaphysically establishes the implication of movement, analytically redefines spatial relationships, and is an absolute bitch to navigate.

"What the hell is this? I can't tell how to get anywhere," one of the site's first visitors told the Cubist Society's Webmaster-Curator, Paulo Cassat. "Is this art, or is this a Web site?"

"Thank you," Cassat responded.
--Cubists Launch Unnavigable Web Site (SatireWire)